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The Electric Cool-Aid Acid Test
In 1968 Tom Wolfe published two bestsellers on the same day: The Pump House Gang, a series of articles about life in the sixties, and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, a nonfiction story about novelist Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters. In Acid Test Wolfe recounts the activities of this group of drug-crazed spiritual adventurers like the reporter he was, but he also succeeds in evoking the spirit of those times in a way that transcends the drugs and the foolishness. His portrait of this northern California crowd gave the world of the 1960s its' first glimpse of the philosophy and vocabulary of the counter-culture that was rapidly turning America's middle-class teenagers into long-haired, peace-signing and extremely uncooperative, "hippies" In the mid-1960s, Ken Kesey, at that time a well known writer who had published the successful One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in 1962 and Sometimes a Great Notion in 1964, and a group of friends traveled the country in a painted bus, conducting LSD "acid tests" along the way. Wolfe recounts their trek across America in their psychedelic bus driven by the well-traveled Neal Cassady, who was also Kerouac's traveling companion in On the Road and who shows up as well in Ginsberg's Howl. Along the way they encounter the Hell's Angels, the FBI, the California police, and the Mexican Federales. Ironically, the notoriety of these parties triggered the over-indulgent "hippie" phenomenon just as he was trying to move away from drugs as a means of spiritual transformation. Tom Wolfe was a journalist already widely known for The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, a collection of articles about the sixties written for New York and Esquire and published in 1965. That book became a bestseller and Wolfe became known as a leading figure in the literary experiments in nonfiction that was called "New Journalism". |
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